Which Way is the Wind Blowing? Really?

Montana is blessed with abundant natural resources. You name the resource, we’ve either still got it (or had it).

Timber. Copper. Silver. Gold. Coal. Wind.

The mindset of those who controlled Montana’s economy,either by size or force, was to take first and rarely answer questions later.

Not sure?

Just ask all of the American Indian nations, the First Montanans.

We’ve always been a colony for buyers elsewhere.

The Last Chancers hit a Mother Lode and the gold rush brought miners by the thousands. They dug, they placered, they built Helena, Virginia City and Nevada City. But, the real wealth left the state.

Our ancestors mined, smelted and refined copper in Montana. There were a lot of good jobs, but the real wealth left the state.

We cut down our forests, milled and processed the logs and sent them elsewhere. And, the real wealth left the state.

We’ve dug up coal and railed it to utilities for them to produce black electrons. We built electrical generation plants next to the coal and generated our own electrons and sent them elsewhere. And, with the coal and power, the real wealth left the state.

Some want to bring coal bed methane to the surface, extract the methane and pipe it to customers elsewhere. When that happens, the real wealth will leave the state.

Heck, for a time, we even mined vermiculite bagged it and sent it to places around the world. The tragedy is that we poisoned the entire community of Libby and killed innocent workers and their neighbors and most likely many of the end users. But, here too, the real wealth still left the state.

America’s and Canada’s industrial consumers need more electricity. We already send sixty percent of our power out of state. And, as loyal colonists, we will build thousands of wind generators, harness the wind and ship the power out of state to them. And, just as with the other developments, the real wealth will leave the state.

In most cases, Montana was left with the crumbs of wealth and our backyards full of the debris left behind by the agents of the wealthy. The pits, the stretches of rivers and ponds laden with toxic waste are now called “Superfund” sites. The good news? A little of that wealth that left us is coming back is coming back to us from the US Treasury (without interest) to help clean up the messes.

We should be happy. After all, the “restoration economy,” as it is called, provides jobs. Jobs necessitated to fix the mistakes of the past.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Sure we want to develop and diversify our economy. But, on whose terms? And, for whose benefit?

Within the past decade, we embarked on developing a “new” resource, wind energy. Clean, renewable and abundant. Next to north Texas, Montana has some of the best wind resources in the country.

The Judith Gap wind farm is the centerpiece.

The region around Cut Bank is next.

Just where else depends.

This is complex stuff.

For as much wind as we have, there is one irrefutable fact: The wind does not blow all of the time everywhere in Montana, or elsewhere for that matter.

We are learning from Mother Nature (finally). If you build forty wind generators in the same wind shed, when the wind stops blowing, all forty generators stop (or slow down) at the same time.

Lesson: Perhaps we ought to create a distributive system and build the wind generators in groups of four or five in different, “good wind” areas. The challenge here is to get the power onto the grid and move it from the point of production to the point of consumption.

Now, not everyone is sold on this renewable energy “thing.” Detractors say, we told you wind power was going to be more expensive than hydro- and thermal-generated power. (They are armed with a bushel-basket of “concerns,” usually provide by the utility and coal mining lobbies.)

As for price, they’re correct. It is more expensive.

In order to keep the lights on the engines of industry humming, we have to go through a very expensive process to “firm” the power supply when the wind stops or slows down.

Firming, or ancillary, power it’s called. Nationwide, this power is derived from both renewable sources (hydropower) and, in more cases, non-renewable (coal-fired; natural gas fired generators).

In Montana, the principal supply of firming power comes from hydropower sources (dams) in Idaho. Because of the variability of winds conditions, our utilities, most notably Northwestern Energy) buys the power with a contract with Idaho Power for prices you would pay on the open, spot market versus lower-cost, long-term prices.

The point is that ancillary power is expensive.

Despite the fact that Montana has thermal-plants (Colstrip) and dams (Missouri and Clark Fork Rivers), we have import expensive power, from Idaho? Yes. Remember Pennsylvania Power and Light (PPL – Montana)? (Yes, and here, too, the real wealth leaves the state.) It owns most of the power-generating facilities. Northwestern Energy can actually get a better “deal” from Idaho Power.

Many Montanans want more energy from renewable sources and say they will pay more for it. How much more is a matter of great political conjecture.

In 2005, the Montana Legislature passed legislation mandating that certain threshold percentages of Montana’s energy ‘portfolio’ come from renewable sources by specified years. The requirements of the law are not nearly as important as the insufficient legislative concern over climate change. Had it known then what it knows now, the bills likely would have been amended:

1. to speed up the timetable and specify higher percentages of energy to be derived from renewable sources in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and reduce the consumption of finite fossil fuels; or

2. to lengthen the timetable and substantially lower the percentages, arguing the costs of meeting the targets are too high and may put Montana’s economy at a competitive disadvantage.

[The debate over climate change and our renewable resources future hopefully will result in a debate and agreement about an energy policy for Montana.]

In the meantime, once it is constructed, we will send electricity, initially from black [coal fired] and, then, supposedly, increasingly from green electrons [wind farms], to power the massive coal shale and coal tar plants in northern Alberta via the Montana Alberta Tie Line. Known as the MATL Line (line is redundant), it is Governor Schweitzer's baby. His clean and green legislation, enacted in 2007, lowered property taxes (depriving school districts of much-needed tax revenues) sufficiently to make it feasible. It is a tax giveaway, pure and simple.

Rube Goldberg would be proud.

We generate part of the electricity for Montanans from wind farms (clean) that is firmed by uber-expensive electricity hydropower (clean) from Idaho, so we can send some wind energy (clean) to Alberta, so it can convert (carbon dioxide galore) various forms of coal into oil and fuels which can be converted (more carbon dioxide) into energy and contribute to global warming?

And for what? For higher electricity bills, a few jobs and a despoiled panorama.

Who benefits?

And where does the real wealth go, again?

Unless we actually develop an energy policy in this country, perhaps it doesn't matter.

Too many may not care which way the wind is blowing. They will feel comforted by the fact the wind is blowing at all.